Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Earlier this week I enhanced the Vintage Football Card Gallery to let you find the cards of players and coaches who received various honors, such as membership in the Denver Broncos Ring of Fame. Now, for each such honor, I just have to add the honorees to my database. Over the past couple of days I added the members of the Washington Redskins Ring of Fame and the Minnesota Vikings Ring of Honor. The exercise has been interesting: I am familiar with most players who have made the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and now I am learning who was in the next level of great players for each team.

Pictured here are the rookie cards of two players I added to my honors database this week. The first is a 1964 Philadelphia card of Bill Brown, a member of the Vikings Ring of Honor, and the second is a 1955 Bowman card of Gene Brito, a member of the Redskins Ring of Fame. To see the other honors I’ve done so far–and to do more complex searches–see the Advanced Search page of the Gallery.

Earlier this week, I listed the six members of the College Football Hall of Fame 2010 Divisional Class, who will be enshrined this weekend. They will be enshrined along with the eighteen members of the 2009 Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division 1-A) Class. You can see the full list of twenty-four enshrinees on the College Hall of Fame web site.

The split between the Divisional Class and the Bowl Subdivision Class is a little confusing, since classes from different years are being enshrined together. Compounding the confusion, the 2010 Bowl Subdivision Class has already been chosen–before the 2009 class has been enshrined! The 2010 Bowl Subdivision Class, which was announced on May 27, 2010, will be inducted on December 7, 2010, and enshrined in 2011–together with the 2011 Divisional Class. In the meantime, the Hall of Fame itself is moving from South Bend to Atlanta, for more exposure. I suppose all of the annual events–two class announcements, two induction ceremonies, and the two-day enshrinement festival–are meant to maximize exposure, too.

At any rate, only one member of the 2009 Bowl Subdivision class appears on vintage cards. That’s Pervis Atkins, whose rookie card, a 1964 Philadelphia, is pictured here. Atkins played for six seasons with the Rams, Redskins, and Raiders. He also appeared on a 1965 Philadelphia card with the Redskins.

Here are the eighteen members of the 2009 Bowl Subdivision Class, along with some information on their cards. I don’t have many modern cards, so most of the links lead to examples on eBay.

A few vintage football cards show diagrams of plays. To me the diagrams seem like filler, and I am not fond of them. I can’t think of a better subject that starts with “X,” though, so here’s a quick rundown. (Hmm, does that mean I’m using them for filler, too?)

The 1964 and 1965 Philadelphia sets include a “Play of the Year” card for each team. On the front of each card is a diagram of the play and a small image of the team’s head coach. The small images are a nice touch, I suppose, but I would have preferred dedicated cards with full-size images for the coaches.

Among the coaches on the Play of the Year cards are Don Shula and Vince Lombardi. Neither coach, to my knowledge, was pictured on card of his own during his career. The 1964 Play of the Year cards could be considered Shula and Lombardi’s rookie cards, but I haven’t seen them designated as such. Pictured here are the 1964 Packers Play of the Year card and the 1965 Philadelphia Colts Play of the Year card.

The back of each team’s Play of the Year card includes a list of the offensive players, which I like. Occasionally a player’s friend or relative will ask me if I have a card of the player, but I have to tell him that the player never appeared on a card. Since some cardless players’ names appear on the Play of the Year cards, I can at least offer one of those cards to the friend or relative.

As I wrote last year, the Play of the Year cards actually feature some pretty ordinary plays. I theorized then that Philadelphia chose short plays so the diagrams would fit on the cards. Could the Lions’ play of the year really have been just a ten-yard completion? “But Jim, what about that 75-yard TD pass from Earl Morrall to Terry Barr?” “Sorry, Lou, it won’t fit on the card.” I am sticking to my theory.

The Philadelphia cards are the only ones I can think of with play diagrams on the front. A couple of other issues have them on the back. One of these is the 1955 Bowman set, which has a generic play diagram on the back of most cards. Cards of players with lots of stats don’t have diagrams on them, but cards of linemen, defensive players, and rookies all do. Some of the generic diagrams appear on multiple cards, too. Filler, I tell you.

Finally, we have the 1976 Wonder Bread set, which gets my vote for the worst card backs ever. Each features a diagram one of Hank Stram’s favorite plays, along with a detailed description of the play. As a kid–or, for that matter, as an adult–I wouldn’t have given the diagrams a second look. But Stram had just taken over as the Saints’ coach in 1976, so perhaps Topps (who printed the cards for Wonder Bread) was trying to ride the buzz about that. Whatever buzz there was didn’t last long, though: even with Stram’s playbook, the Saints went 7-21 in 1976 and 1977.

• Previous: W is for Wonder Bread–and Other Food Issues
• Next: Y is for Yale
• All of the ABCs

Back when kickers still kicked “conventionally,” some of them wore special square-toed kicking shoes. A few of the shoes showed up on cards: here we have a 1964 Philadelphia Sam Baker, a 1966 Philadelphia Bruce Gossett, and a 1974 Topps Curt Knight.

Reading about these kickers, I discovered that each of the three attempted at least one “fair catch kick” in his career. Knight attempted two of them. According to Wikipedia, in the history of the NFL, only 21 such kicks have been attempted in regular season and playoff games. Alas, our three square-toed kickers all missed their kicks.

As I wrote on my pre-rookie cards page, “rookie card” is an unfortunate term. Years ago, most players’ “rookie” cards were not printed in their rookie years, but sometime later, after they were established as pros. Many players, even Hall of Famers, didn’t appear on cards until well into their careers. Some didn’t appear on cards until long after their playing days were over. Dick Lane, for example, had 14 interceptions–still a league record–as a rookie for the Rams in 1952, but he didn’t appear on a card until 1957. Don Hutson played for the Packers from 1935 to 1945, but no one printed football cards from 1936 to 1947, so Hutson’s rookie card is a 1955 Topps All-American.

So “first card” would be a more accurate term than “rookie card.” Even that isn’t quite right, though, since players sometimes appeared on cards in minor sets before their rookie cards were issued. To be a rookie card, it is understood that a card has to have been printed by a major card company, such as Topps or Bowman. And it has to be a regular issue card, not an insert. So “first regular issue card printed by a major card company” is more precise, though it would make for a long abbreviation. And there’s even some contention about that: PSA’s Pro Football Hall of Fame Rookie Players registry set accepts either 1950 Topps Felt Backs or 1951 Bowmans for the rookie cards of Lou Creekmur and Ernie Stautner. Why? Perhaps because the 1950 Topps Felt Backs are small and ugly. So the registry’s definition of rookie card is “first regular issue card printed by a major card company, unless it’s small and ugly, in which case you can substitute a different one.”

There are other slight hitches. One is that sometimes cards picture the wrong player. Packer fullback Jim Taylor’s rookie card, a 1959 Topps, actually pictures Jim Taylor of the Cardinals. So does his 1960 Topps card. The 1959 Topps card is generally known as Taylor’s rookie card, but his picture doesn’t actually appear on a card until 1961. Some collectors consider his 1961 Topps and 1961 Fleer cards to be his real rookie cards, and Taylor himself reportedly won’t sign his 1959 Topps card.

Also, how about the 1964 Philadelphia Packers’ Play of the Year and Colts’ Play of the Year cards, which have small images of Vince Lombardi and Don Shula? Are they Lombardi and Shula’s rookie cards? I would say so, but my Beckett doesn’t have them marked as such. It does have them priced like rookie cards, though.

And why aren’t cards in the 1961 Nu-Card set considered rookie cards? Roman Gabriel, John Hadl, and Ernie Davis all appear in that set, but their Topps cards from later years are considered their rookie cards. The Nu-Card set pictures college players, but so do the 1951 Topps Magic and 1955 Topps All-American sets, and cards in those sets can be rookie cards. Is the 1961 Nu-Card set not considered a major issue? To my knowledge, the cards were distributed nationally, and there are plenty of them around, so they seem to me to be a major issue.

Whether or not a card is a rookie card has a large influence on its price, of course. Rookie cards, especially of Hall of Famers, are popular with collectors, so there is a high demand for them. Why are rookie cards more popular than other cards? Well, honestly, I think that someone with an early influence on the hobby–perhaps someone compiling a price guide–said “rookie cards should be worth more,” collectors said “okay,” and so it was. Intuitively this makes some sense, since older cards are generally scarcer than newer ones, and a player’s first card would tend to be his scarcest. This certainly isn’t true in all cases, though, so declaring rookie cards more valuable than others is largely artificial.

Perhaps rookie cards were declared valuable to help fuel the modern card market. Modern card collectors like to buy new players’ rookie cards, speculating that the players will become stars and their cards will become valuable. Collectors in the vintage card market do some of this, too: since rookie cards of Hall of Fame players are valuable, collectors speculate by buying cards of senior candidates for the Hall of Fame. The Bob Hayes rookie card pictured here is an example of a card whose price jumped recently, when Hayes was elected to the Hall of Fame.

Some players have more than one rookie card; this happened when more than one company printed cards of the same league in the same year. Sammy Baugh has a 1948 Bowman rookie card, for instance, and also a 1948 Leaf rookie card. Jim Otto has both 1961 Topps and 1961 Fleer rookie cards. For most years before 1970, though–the years I think of as vintage–only one company per year printed cards for a given league, if anyone printed football cards at all.

It seems to me that the concept of a rookie card serves as a convenient way to identify a player’s most desirable card. Which card is a player’s rookie card can sometimes be ambiguous, but identifying a player’s rookie card is much less contentious than, say, trying to decide on his most attractive card, or his scarcest. Picking a most desirable card for each player helps collectors narrow their collecting focus: they can collect rookie cards of Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, players from their favorite team, etc.

I have 80-90% of the rookie cards marked in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, including those of players who appear on only a card or two. You can use the Advanced Search page to look for rookie cards in combination with other criteria.

• Previous: Q is for Quarterbacks
• Next: S is for Scratch-Offs
• All of the ABCs

The Philadelphia Gum Company printed football cards from 1964 to 1967. For those four years, Philadelphia had the rights to NFL players, and Topps had the rights to AFL players. The contrast between the companies’ products is striking: the Topps sets of those years are colorful and varied, and the Philadelphia sets are simple and conservative.

All four of the Philadelphia sets are similar. Each of them has 198 cards, grouped by team, and the last two cards in each set are checklists. The teams are ordered alphabetically by city, with Baltimore first in 1964 and 1965 and Atlanta first in 1966 and 1967. Each set contains a team photo card for each team.

I find the 1964 Philadelphia set to be the most attractive of the four, because the colored nameplates with the white borders around them make the cards brighter than the other years. Most of the 1964 cards are easy to find in high grade, though, and that takes some of the fun out of it. A few cards–the checklists come to mind–are challenging because of centering. (See C is for Checklists.)

The Play of the Year cards are the plainest in the 1964 set, and in truth they feature some pretty ordinary plays. They do include photos of the coaches, though, and among the coaches are Vince Lombardi and Don Shula, who had not appeared on cards before. My Beckett catalog does not recognize the Lombardi and Shula cards as their rookie cards, but I don’t know why. The back of each Play of the Year card also lists the offensive players involved in the play. Some of these players never appeared on cards of their own, but at least their names appear here in print.

The 1964 Philly set includes the rookie cards of five Hall of Fame players–Herb Adderley, John Mackey, Willie Davis, Jim Johnson, and Merlin Olsen. Philadelphia misspelled Adderley’s name on his card, and they misspelled it the next three years, too. Other bits of 1964 Philadelphia trivia are that Jim Brown’s Cadillac appears in the background on all of the Browns’ cards, and that the player pictured on Garland Boyette’s card is actually Don Gillis.

1965 Philadelphia is the dullest of the four sets. It has essentially the same composition as the 1964 set–single-player cards, team cards, play cards, and checklists–but it has little color because the nameplates have a black background. Most of the players even look unhappy.

The one bit of innovation in the set is the “Who Am I?” rub-off quiz on the card backs. Oddly, rubbing the card reveals a player’s picture and the answer for a different card, so you have to rub one card to get the question and rub another card to get the answer. Also, my friend Steve from thecowboysguide.com said that not all of the rub-offs work. In Steve’s words, “You’ll get some duds because of age and condition.”

On a positive note, the set holds the rookie cards of five Hall of Fame players: Paul Warfield, Mel Renfro, Paul Krause, Carl Eller, and Charley Taylor. And Renfro is actually smiling!

Perhaps collectors noticed that the 1965 set was dull, because the next year Philadelphia shook things up a bit. The 1966 Philadelphia set returned to colored nameplates, for play cards it had action photos instead of X-and-O diagrams, and it even had two cards–Morrall and Scholtz and Gabriel and Bass–with two players on them. The set also gave the Atlanta Falcons a proper introduction. Since the Falcons were new to the league, the card company could not include an action card for them from the year before, so instead they included a Falcons insignia card. The insignia was big and bold, and it happened to be the first card in the set.

One thing I noticed about the 1966 action photos is that they were all shot in New York and Los Angeles. As a result, the action cards picture a lot of Giants and Rams defensive players. Each of the action cards has a referee signal on the back, and card #196 is dedicated to referee signals. Compared to Topps’s cards, which had cartoons and fun facts on the back, Philadelphia’s cards were all business.

The 1966 Philadelphia set is much tougher than its predecessors to complete in high grade. While some cards are plentiful, others are scarce, and I suspect that a lot of them are undocumented short prints. I found a picture of an uncut sheet that suggests why. For a 198-card set, I would expect there to be three 132-card sheets, with each sheet containing two-thirds of the set. Between the three sheets, there would then be two of each card. The sheet I found, though, contains 110 of the 198 cards, and the top two rows are repeated. There had to be at least another sheet that held the remaining 88 cards, but I can’t think of how a small number of additional sheets could have been configured to even out the distribution of cards. Rows 3 through 6 on the sheet I found contain some of the tough cards in the set, so I’ll wager that those rows did not appear on another sheet.

Like the two earlier Philadelphia sets, the 1966 set contains the rookie cards of five Hall of Fame players. Six years ago it contained only two, Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus. The other three–Bob Brown, Gene Hickerson, and Bob Hayes, have all been inducted in the past five years.

For more details on the 1966 Philadelphia set, you can read Jim Churilla’s article on the PSA web site.

In 1967, Philadelphia printed their last set of football cards. Like the 1966 set, it has a funky distribution: some cards are plentiful in high grades, and some are downright scarce. The company got a bit less conservative in 1967, coloring the borders yellow and adding colorful cards of the team insignias. 1967 was the year that New Orleans joined the NFL, so a bit more color was fitting.

Two bits of trivia are worth mentioning: Raymond Berry’s 1967 Philadelphia card actually pictures Bob Boyd, and Paul Hornung appears on a Saints card, but he retired before the start of the season. The 1967 Philly set contains three rookie cards of Hall of Fame players: Leroy Kelly, Jackie Smith, and Dave Wilcox.

Though I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, it seems that in the Philadelphia years, the Philadelphia and Topps issues reflected the images of the leagues they represented. The Philly sets were conservative, consistent, and unadorned. The 1964-1967 Topps sets were colorful and innovative, with stars and tall boys and TVs. Philadelphia had the talent, and Topps had the flash. Philadelphia’s run was too short to draw conclusions, but by 1967 it seems as though Topps was prompting Philadelphia to lighten up, just as the AFL was pressuring the NFL to enliven its game.

• Previous: O is for Oddball
• Next: P is also for Playing Cards
• All of the ABCs

Compared to quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, and even kickers, defensive players often got short shrift when the card companies chose the players to put on their cards. The 1968 Topps Stand Up insert set is an extreme example of the bias toward offensive players: in the 22-card set there is only one defensive player, Alex Karras. Even he might not have been included if the 1968 Lions had had an offensive star. Another example, the 1970 Topps Super Glossy set, is somewhat less unbalanced: it contains 25 offensive players, 7 defensive players, and 1 kicker.

Numerous Hall of Fame defensive players were in the league for years before appearing on a card. The most egregious example I can think of is Dick Lane. In 1952, his rookie year with the Rams, Lane had 14 interceptions, an NFL record that still stands–and he did it in 12 games! In 1954 he again led the league in interceptions, with 10, this time with the Cardinals. Despite his performance–and though the Cardinals were hardly flush with stars–Lane first appeared on a 1957 Topps card, and his next appearance was on a 1961 Fleer. (Lane’s biography on Wikipedia–assuming it is accurate–is fascinating. It says his mother found him in a Dumpster!)

Another Hall of Fame defensive player, Len Ford, played for 11 years but appeared on only two cards: his 1955 Bowman rookie card and a 1957 Topps card. He began his career in 1948 with the Los Angeles Dons of the AAFC, and he joined the Browns in 1950 when the AAFC folded and the Browns joined the NFL. No major company printed cards of AAFC players, but Bowman printed cards of NFL players every year from 1950 to 1955, and they finally included Ford in their last year.

At least four Lombardi-era Packers defensive players also made late rookie card appearances: Ray Nitschke began his career in 1958, and his rookie card is a 1963 Topps. Willie Davis also joined the team in 1958, and his rookie card is a 1964 Philadelphia. Herb Adderley joined the team in 1961, and his rookie card is also a 1964 Philadelphia–with his name misspelled, to boot. Willie Wood started in 1960, and his rookie card is a 1963 Topps.

Two Chiefs Hall of Fame defensive backs provide a final example: Willie Lanier joined the Chiefs in 1967, and his rookie card is a 1971 Topps. Emmitt Thomas joined in 1966, and his rookie card is a 1972 Topps.

Occasionally, when it took a while for a defensive player to appear on a card from a major company, the player would appear first on a “pre-rookie” card in a regional or oddball set. All four of the Packers mentioned above had pre-rookie cards in the 1961 Lake to Lake Packers set. Hall of Famers Bob Lilly, Jim Johnson, and Larry Wilson all had pre-rookie cards in the 1962 Post Cereal set. And as I wrote in a previous post, Rams star Ed Meador appeared on 1959 Bell Brand, 1960 Bell Brand, and 1962 Post Cereal cards before his 1963 Topps rookie card was issued. Another long-time Ram, Jack Pardee, whose rookie card is a 1964 Philadelphia, also appeared in the Bell Brand and Post Cereal sets.

Changing the subject a bit, it is worth noting that until 1959, football cards did not distinguish between offensive and defensive positions when there was ambiguity. For example, if a player’s card said “end,” he could have been either a receiver or a defensive end. If it said “back,” he could have been either a running back or a defensive back. Pictured here is an example: Jack Butler was a defensive back, but his 1957 Topps rookie card just says “back.” (This, by the way, is another late rookie card. Butler started his career with the Steelers in 1951.) Perhaps this was a vestige of the time when players played both offense and defense, and a back on offense would also have been a back on defense. Whatever the reason, because of the ambiguity, I probably still have some defensive players listed as offensive players in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Occasionally a kind person sends me a correction.

• Previous: C is for Checklists
• Next: E is for Error Cards
• All of the ABCs

My old (2005) Beckett football card catalog defines checklist as such:

A card that lists in order the cards and players in the set or series. Older checklist cards in mint condition that have not been checked off are very desirable and command large premiums.

The first football set to include a checklist card was 1956 Topps. That card is shown here, to the right. Except for 1958, every Topps set from 1956 to 1975 includes checklists. (More recent sets undoubtedly do, too, but my collection stops at 1975.) In both 1956 and 1957, the checklist was short-printed and not numbered, but for both years the checklist is considered part of the set.

Topps printed two versions of the 1957 checklist, one with a Bazooka bubble gum ad on the back, and the other with a Twin Blony ad. The Twin Blony checklist is scarcer, but either version of the checklist is considered sufficient to complete the set. Shown here is a 1957 checklist with the Bazooka back.

In 1959 and 1960, rather than printing standalone checklist cards, Topps put a checklist on the back of each team card. Some team cards have a checklist for the first half of the set, and some have a checklist for the second half. Since there is a team card for each team in the league, each checklist appears numerous times in the set. Redundant, yes, but the kids were reasonably assured of getting the checklists.

The second 1961 Topps checklist is unusual: besides listing 1961 Topps cards 78-132, it has a checklist on the back for 36 Cloth Emblem inserts. (See I is for Inserts for a picture of one.) I believe the 36 emblems listed here were distributed with the first series of 1961 Topps cards; they included the NFL teams, the NFL insignia, and some colleges. Twelve more emblems–the AFL teams, AFL insignia, and three more colleges–were released with the second series, but, oddly, Topps did not print a checklist for those. The second series checklist, card number 198, lists just cards 133-198. Perhaps Topps simply did not have enough room on that checklist to include the second series emblems.

Topps checklists from 1962 to 1965 are unremarkable: one or two per set, with a few being short prints. I won’t show them all here, but you can see all of the checklists for all of the sets in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

In 1966, Topps got weird. Included in 1966 football card packs were Funny Rings, insert cards from which you could punch out silly rings to put on your fingers. (You can usually find some on eBay.) The inserts themselves aren’t odd–cards back then were printed for kids, after all–but what is odd is that the checklist for the Funny Rings is card number 15 in the football card set. Nothing on the Funny Ring Checklist has anything to do with football, but since it is a numbered card in the set, collectors are compelled to have it. No problem, except that the checklist has notoriously poor top-to-bottom centering, so it is hard to find in high grade, and hence it is very expensive. (An article by Kevin Glew about the 1966 Topps set describes the poor centering of the checklists and the woes of the men who collect them.)

In 1967, the Topps checklists again were unremarkable. In 1968 and 1969, though, Topps decided to issue a second series checklist with both the first and second series cards. Why? I’m guessing that they included a second series checklist with the first series to entice kids to buy the second series, but they also put one in the second series in case the kids hadn’t bought the first series cards. At any rate, the checklists issued with each series have the characteristics of the other cards in that series, so there are two variations of each second series checklist.

First series 1968 Topps cards have green printing on the back, and second series cards have blue printing, so the second series checklist can be found with either green or blue printing. First series 1969 Topps cards have no border, but second series cards do, so the 1969 second series checklist comes both with and without a border. Shown here are the two variations of the 1969 Topps second series checklist.

I am not aware of any oddities in the Topps checklists from 1970 to 1975, but I do know that Topps printed team checklists in 1973 and 1974, in addition to the regular checklists. These team checklists were not part of the regular sets. I don’t yet have them in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but you can see examples of the team checklists on eBay.

Now, on to Topps’s competition:

Fleer printed football cards from 1960 to 1963, but only the 1963 Fleer set includes a checklist, and it appears to have been an afterthought. The 1963 Fleers were printed on two sheets, with most players appearing three times between the two sheets. (See my virtual 1963 Fleer uncut sheet for details.) The checklist displaced a Bob Dougherty card on one sheet and a Charles Long card on the other, hence the Dougherty and Long became short prints. The checklist is also a short print, since it appears just twice between the two sheets. Like the 1956 and 1957 Topps checklists, the 1963 Fleer checklist was not numbered, but it is considered part of the set. The borders on the checklist are thin, so high-grade, well-centered examples are rare. The centering of the card shown here is typical.

The Philadelphia Gum Company printed football cards from 1964 to 1967, and they included two checklists in each set. Philadelphia was consistent from year to year: each of the four sets is a single series of 198 cards, and cards 197 and 198 in each set are the checklists. The 1964 Philadelphia checklists are error cards–they both say 1963–and they are typically off-center, like the one shown here. The 1965-1967 Philadelphia checklists are unremarkable and plentiful in high grade.

Having reviewed the checklists, let’s look again at Beckett’s definition. The first part says a checklist lists, in order, the cards in a set or series. That sounds right. But what about the second part, “Older checklist cards in mint condition that have not been checked off are very desirable and command large premiums”? Well, like the claim that the first card and last card in a set are scarcer in high grade (see the discussion on my virtual 1959 Topps uncut sheet page), I think the claim that unchecked checklists command a premium is greatly exaggerated. Sure, kids marked some checklists, but I’ll bet that more went unmarked than were marked. Not all kids bothered to check off their cards, and even when they did, one checklist would have sufficed, and any duplicates would have gone unmarked.

No, I think that if a checklist is scarce in high grade, it is because of other factors, namely short printing or poor centering. The 1956 and 1957 Topps checklists are scarce, but they were short printed. The 1963 Fleer, 1964 Philadelphia, and 1966 Topps checklists are scarce in high grades, but it is because they are usually off-center.

On the other hand, checklists that are not short prints and that are not known for centering problems do not command much of a premium. The 1961 Topps #198 checklist shown here (also the last card in the set) lists for $65-100 in price guides, but a PSA 7 sells for about $20 on eBay. Even generously doubling that $20 to get a retail price puts it well below the “book value.” The 1960 Topps #132 Redskins team (checklist on back, last card in set) lists for $28-30 in the price guides, but a PSA 7 on eBay goes for $8-10. Likewise for the 1965 Philadelphia #197 checklist: it is $30 in the price guides, but about $8-10 on eBay. What’s more, I think the prices realized are actually inflated by the price guides: if the price guides didn’t overprice them, would they sell for as much as they do?

• Previous: B is for Bowman
• Next: D is for Defensive Players
• All of the ABCs

Misspelled names are common on vintage football cards, but Philadelphia Gum Co. takes the prize: they misspelled Herb Adderley‘s name on all four cards they printed of him. His name is spelled Adderly on his 1964 Philadelphia rookie card and all of his cards for the next three years.

From 1964 to 1967, Philadelphia had the rights to print cards of NFL players, and Topps had the rights to the AFL. When Topps obtained the rights to the NFL in 1968, Adderley finally got his name spelled correctly. But Topps later slipped up, too, and got it wrong on Adderley’s 1972 card.

Adderley also had a pre-rookie card, a 1961 Lake to Lake Packers card distributed regionally in Wisconsin. The locals got it right: on this card his name was spelled correctly.

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: Herb Adderley
• Search eBay for: Herb Adderley, Herb Adderly

A customer once bought a Lions team card from me because his friend played for the Lions the year the card was printed. Unfortunately, his friend wasn’t in the picture, and the customer got upset. What he didn’t realize is that the card companies would use the same photos year after year, and the photo on his team card was an old one. I explained and offered a refund, but I didn’t hear back from him.

Here are the cards I used to demonstrate to him that I wasn’t making it up. The Philadelphia Gum Company used the same image of Mick Tingelhoff in 1964, 1965, and 1967. (They used a different image in 1966, but it wasn’t as good as this one.) If you browse through the Football Card Gallery, you can find many more instances where the card companies reused photos. Joe Namath is another good example: look for the Band-Aid on his head in cards from 1968 through 1970.

Sometimes the companies would even recolor the player’s uniform if he happened to change teams. John Henry Johnson’s 1957 Topps card, which I showed in an earlier post, is a great example–though in this case, Topps got John Henry’s new team wrong.

• Search Nearmint’s Football Cards for: Mick Tingelhoff, Joe Namath, John Henry Johnson
• Search eBay for: Mick Tingelhoff, Joe Namath, John Henry Johnson